Category: Govt Shutdown

President Donald Trump folded like a cheap lawn chair after Nancy Pelosi pulled the ultimate power play in their dispute over the location of his State of the Union Address.

President Trump agreed to postpone his address after Pelosi drafted a letter informing him she would not allow him to hold his State Of The Union address in the House Chamber. Pelosi, 79, is the Speaker of the House.

In her letter Pelosi asked President Trump to reschedule his address until after the partial government shutdown ends.

The shutdown is now in its 5th week – the longest government shutdown in US history. 800,000 federal workers are furloughed without pay.

There appears to be no end in sight for the shutdown, as both sides refuse to surrender to the other side’s demands.

President Trump waited until Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other high ranking Democrats boarded a bus to the airport to inform them that their 7-day excursion to Europe, Africa and the Middle East was cancelled.

Pelosi and about two dozen lawmakers sat fuming on an Air Force bus while aides frantically called the Pentagon and White House to confirm their trip had really been canceled.

Witnesses say the bus circled the Capitol building several times before it finally pulled up to the Capitol and let the passengers off. Military officers carried Pelosi’s baggage back inside the Capitol building and left them on a cart in the hallway outside her office.

The spat between Trump and Pelosi began when she tried to cancel his State of the Union Address on Thursday. She claimed the President couldn’t speak to the nation because there weren’t enough Secret Service agents during the shutdown. But the Secret Service disputed her claim.

In a letter to Pelosi on Thursday, Trump canceled Pelosi’s publicly unannounced trip, saying 800,000 workers were not being paid, so she needed to stay home to negotiate the funding of the border wall to end the shutdown.

Petty Trump told Pelosi she could still fly to Europe – on a commercial airliner if she insist.

While I agree with what the President addressed in his letter, the fact that such a letter was issued and then made public with a misspelling is unprofessional. It also speaks to the level of individuals he has working in his administration.

This is President Trump’s shutdown because Pelosi is not going to fund a 5 billion dollar wall on the U.S. tax payers dime. Furthermore Trump need to check his facts, immigrants and drug smugglers are crossing the border into the U.S. not by a border wall.

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 08: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the nation in his first-prime address from the Oval Office of the White House on January 8, 2019 in Washington, DC. A partial shutdown of the federal government has gone on for 17 days following the president’s demand for $5.7 billion for a border wall while Democrats have refused. (Photo by Carlos Barria-Pool/Getty Images)

President Trump took to the air last night on prime-time television to deliver his first televised national address to Americans from the Oval Office of the White House, to explain why the partial government shutdown is necessary to secure $5.7 billion dollars to fund the border wall.

In an unprecedented move, the three major TV networks limited President Trump’s speech to only 8 minutes. The networks initially hesitated to air the President’s speech at all because they feared he would say the wrong thing. Either way, I wasn’t tuned in.

Trump urged the American people to support his battle with the Democrats for border wall funding. “This is a choice between right and wrong, justice and injustice,” he said, describing border security as “a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.”

Trump said Black and Hispanic Americans were hardest hit by the immigration crisis. He said migrant women and children were “victims” of lawless gangs and human smugglers who raped 1/3 of women on the way to the U.S.

“These children are used as human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs,” he said.

Trump said drugs and crime coming across the border endangered American lives.

The current shutdown began on December 22, and is estimated to cost the American taxpayers $6.5 billion per week.

President Barack Obama held a press conference today to discuss the ongoing standoff over the government shutdown, which entered its second week today, as well as the looming debt ceiling deadline on October 17th.

“Take this drama off the table” the president said and let congress be on record for taking a vote today to end this government shutdown.

Obama let it all hang out even stating that it’s the tea-party who has Boehner and his colleagues in this petty strong-hold of threats. In the meantime holding the American people hostage until they get their way. The president stressed that he’s tired and he knows the American people are tired of this game of retaliation as well.

Obama says he urged Boehner to hold a vote immediately to reopen the government. A vote could end the shutdown today!